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to talk about what our issues were.
That grew to running a national confer-
ence, which then grew to a discussion
in 2007 where it was established that
this route for boarding support need to
be developed more officially.”
This conversation happened between
Stokes and Dr. Tim Hawkes, a promi-
nent Australian educator and current
headmaster of The King’s School (day
and boarding) in Sydney.
“We agreed that we needed to pro-
vide this service for all boarding
schools. He and I formed the associa-
tion, he was my founding chair, and we
carried on from there.”
From those sparks of a voluntary
group of concerned boarding staff,
ABSA was formed. Every single board-
ing school in Australia is now a mem-
ber.
“In 2008, I sold the concept of the
association to Principals and Heads of
Boarding through the country,” Stoked
explained, “I highlighted what we’d al-
ready achieved, how we’d united so
many schools already, and pushed
what a great service we could provide.
“We probably got about 80% of the
country’s boarding schools joining in
ABSA’s first year. Now to me, this was
quite remarkable, I was as surprised
as anyone.”
The specifics
In terms of the day-to-day, ABSA is
actually only run by two staff, Stokes
himself, and his general manager
Thomas Dunsmore, and the pair have
an administrative trainee to aid them.
The job of ABSA, is to support board-
ing schools in the best way that it can.
Stokes’ and Dunsmore’s jobs involve
a great deal of them training boarding
schools. Stokes himself helped with
the updating of ABSA’s ‘Duty of Care’
workbooks, authored by Hawkes,
books which are a part of ABSA’s